The vote from the seven-member board was 6-1. The announcement cameless than seven hours before Foster was scheduled to be taken to thedeath chamber for lethal injection.

Perry does not have to accept the highly unusual recommendation fromthe board whose members he appoints.

There was no immediate response from the governor's office.

Foster was the getaway driver and not the actual shooter in the slayingof a 25-year-old man in San Antonio 11 years ago.

Foster acknowledged he and his friends were up to no good as he drovethem around San Antonio in a rental car and robbed at least four people11 years ago before the slaying of Michael LaHood Jr.

"It was wrong," Foster, 30, said recently from death row. "I don't wantto downplay that. I was wrong for that. I was too much of a follower.I'm straight up about that."

Their robbery spree, while they were all high on alcohol and marijuana,turned deadly when Foster followed LaHood and his girlfriend toLaHood's home about 2 a.m. Aug. 15, 1996. One of Foster's passengers,Mauriceo Brown, jumped out, walked up to LaHood, demanded his walletand car keys, then opened fire when LaHood, 25, couldn't produce them.LaHood, shot through the eye, died instantly.

Brown ran back to Foster's car and they sped away. Less than an hourlater, Foster was pulled over for speeding and driving erratically.Foster, Brown, Dwayne Dillard and Julius Steen ? all on probation andmembers of a street gang they called the Hoover 94 Crips ? werearrested for LaHood's slaying.

Brown and Foster, tried together, were convicted of capital murder andsentenced to death. Foster was set to die 13 months after Brown, 31,was strapped to the same death chamber gurney in Huntsville for lethalinjection.

Foster's execution would make him the third Texas prisoner executed inas many days and the 24th this year in the nation's most active capitalpunishment state. On Wednesday evening, John Joe Amador, 32, was put todeath for the slaying of a San Antonio taxi driver 13 1/2 years ago.

Foster's scheduled execution piqued death penalty opponents whocriticized his conviction and sentence under Texas' law of parties,which makes non-triggermen equally accountable for the crime. Fosterwould join a number of other condemned prisoners executed under thestatute, including one put to death earlier this year.

"This is a new low for Texas," said Larry Cox, executive director ofAmnesty International USA, a human rights organization that opposes thedeath penalty in all cases. "Allowing his life to be taken is ashocking perversion of the law."

Foster's lawyers were arguing in the courts that statements fromDillard and Steen, who were in Foster's car that night, clarify andprovide new evidence that support Foster when he says he didn't knowBrown was going to try to rob and shoot LaHood.

"I didn't kill anybody," Foster insisted from death row. "I screwed up.I went down the wrong path. I fault myself for being in this messed-upsystem."

Foster said he was some 80 feet away from the shooting.

"It's hard for you to anticipate how Brown is going to react," Fostersaid. "Texas is saying flat out: You should have known better.

"In life, we have hindsight. Texas is saying you better have foresight.They're saying you better be psychic."

Dillard now is serving life for killing a taxi driver across the streetfrom the Alamo two weeks before LaHood's slaying. Steen testified atBrown's trial and received a life sentence in a plea bargain.

Brown testified at his trial the shooting was in self-defense, that hebelieved LaHood had a gun. Authorities, however, never found anotherweapon near LaHood's body. Foster did not testify.

"I thought what (Brown) said was good enough," he said from death row.

Mike Ramos, among the Bexar County prosecutors handling the case whenit went to trial, said he found Foster's claims unbelievable and wasirritated by a publicity effort to spare Foster.

"When you let somebody out of your car with a loaded handgun, what doyou expect?" Ramos said. "If he didn't realize it could happen, I thinkhe's a liar."

Last weekend a group of Foster supporters picketed outside an Austinchurch Gov. Rick Perry attends.

Ramos said it was clear to him that Foster was "the puppet masterpulling all the strings" during the robbery spree.

Nico LaHood, whose brother was killed, said Wednesday he was frustratedthat people were willing to believe only Foster's story, which hecalled "ridiculous and not true."

"I don't know what dynamics are going on that allow us to make theperson who is the wrongdoer to become the victim in this case," LaHoodsaid. His brother, he said, was being "lost in the whole thing."

On Wednesday, Amador asked for forgiveness for himself and peace "forpeople seeking revenge toward me," then was put to death for the fatalshooting of San Antonio taxi driver Mohammad Reza Ayari.

Another execution, the first of five scheduled for September in Texas,is set for next week when South Carolina native Tony Roach facesinjection Wednesday for the strangling of an Amarillo woman, RonnieDawn Hewitt, 37, during a burglary of her apartment nine years ago.